Former Under Secretary of the Treasury for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence Jimmy Gurule said the U.S. Department of the Treasury is not doing enough to stop cash from flowing to Islamic State terrorists.
After reports that IS is minting its own currency emerged Thursday, Gurule told CNN's Jake Tapper that the Treasury Department "has had difficulty in developing traction" in identifying individuals who are funneling thousands--if not millions--of dollars to IS (ISIL or ISIS).
"They haven't identified any individual, at least they haven't placed them on the Treasury list for blocking and freezing the assets of the middlemen, of the smugglers, of corrupt border guards at the border looking the other way when the oil is being smuggled across the border into Turkey," Gurule said. "I think the Treasury Department needs to intensify its efforts on those types of individuals."
Gurule said IS has up to $1 billion in its reserve and is "the wealthiest terrorist organization that the world has ever known."
"With that kind of money, it's hard to understand, what's the potential? What could they do with that? So certainly it's a possibility. The difficulty with that kind of money is, you can't just put that money in shoeboxes and place it under your mattress. It has to enter into the financial system at some point in time," Gurule said. "I think the Treasury needs to be focusing on banks, banks in Qatar, for example, and in Kuwait that may be the recipients and handling money for ISIS."
Although current Under Secretary David S. Cohen said IS "cannot possibly meet the most basic needs of the people it seeks to rule," Gurule said they should not be underestimated.
"Some of that [money] has to go back into humanitarian activities for the people and the populations that they control, but they certainly have ample funds to finance their terrorist operations, to kill innocent civilians, to orchestrate and plan and implement terrorist attacks," Gurule said. "So they shouldn't be taken lightly."